Tag: William Wordsworth

Posted on

Hammack — Imperfect Notices (May 2018)

Hammack, E. R. “‘Imperfect Notices’: The 1820 Continental Journal of Mary Wordsworth.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 37.1 (May 2028): 91–110.

Abstract: “Through a close reading of Mary Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental travel journal, this essay challenges her peripheral status in studies of the Wordsworth writing circle. It offers a formalist analysis of the text, demonstrating the qualities and aspects of Mary’s writing that contribute to the importance of her journal in relation to the other literary endeavors of the tour. Mary’s writing, with its elliptical style and panoramic descriptions, reveals a sophisticated and imaginatively creative mind, one that was an equal participant in the coterie of the tour’s writers, including Henry Crabb Robinson and Dorothy Wordsworth. This essay seeks to free the journal from its critical relegation to a mere resource for William Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, instead approaching the journal on its own terms. The analysis calls for further consideration of Mary’s journals in relation to contexts of travel writing, romantic narrative, and women’s writing.”

Posted on

Lafford — Dorothy Wordsworth and the Writing of Resolve (2022)

Lafford, Erin. “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Writing of Resolve.” Cambridge Quarterly 5.13 (September 2022): 207–24.

Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal is a text framed self-consciously as the result of her ‘resolve’ to write it. When studied carefully, this term captures at once a capacity for firm intention and steadfastness of purpose, and the potential for lapse and dissolution; Wordsworth’s journal holds both senses in play as it forms an index of habitual life. Reading the journal alongside two rich sites of reflection on the psychophysiological contours of habit—household management and domestic health regimen—invites attention towards it as a more capacious form for tracing the fluctuating nature of self-control than perhaps her brother’s Romantic lyric.”

Posted on

Gittings — Dorothy Wordsworth (1985)

Gittings, Robert, and Jo Manton. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

“The last scholarly biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, written by Ernest de Selincourt, appeared over fifty years ago. Despite the great merits of this work, a new Life must be needed to take into account much that has emerged in the past five decades, and, in particular, more recent editing and scholarship” (p. vii).

Contents: List of plates — 1. “Dear Aunt” — 2. “Poor Dolly” — 3. “The Oeconomy of Charity” — 4. “The character and virtues of my Brother” — 5. “The First Home” — 6. “Coleridge’s Society” — 7. “Lyrical Ballads”— 8. “Wild, sequestered valley” — 9. “Plenty of Business” — 10. “Either joy or sorrow” — 11. “My tears will flow” — 12. “I shall always date Grasmere” — 13. “Those innocent children” — 14. “The Ambleside Gentry” — 15. “Dear Antelope” — 16. “We all want Miss W.” — 17. “This quiet room” — 18. “Oftener merry than sad” — Appendix One — Appendix Two — Notes — Bibliography — Index.

Reviews: Joyce Johnson, Washington Post, Book World, 1 September 1985, p. 5; Leon Waldoff, Modern Language Review 83.1 (1988): 157.

Copy: Library of Congress.

Digital copy: Internet Archive.

Posted on

Jerram — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Illness (2021)

Jerram, Tim. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Illness—Psychiatry in Literature.” British Journal of Psychiatry 218.2 (February 2021): 87.

“. . . her condition was fully described both by her family and by literary visitors, and from her own Journals and the many descriptions of her by William and their literary acquaintances we know much about her premorbid state. From these we can ascribe many of her health problems to thyroid disease.”

Posted on

Beattie-Smith — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland (2021)

Beattie-Smith, Gillian. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author (Dzienniki szkockie Dorothy Wordsworth: Kreacja autorki romantycznej).” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 27.1 (2021); 51–67.

Abstract: “The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.”

Posted on

Ashton — William and Dorothy (1938)

Ashton, Helen. William and Dorothy: A Novel of the Wordsworths. London: Collins, 1938; New York: Macmillan 1938.

Includes a short bibliography (pp. 3–4). “The first idea of this book was given to me by my sister, Katherine Davies, when we were collaborating in I Had a Sister (Lovat Dickson, 1937). It was she who suggested that Dorothy Wordsworth should be made the heroine of this novel” (p. 3).

Reprinted 1950, 1968, 1974.

An online version of the 1938 edition (New York) is available on HathiTrust.

Posted on

Soderholm — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return (1995)

Soderholm, James. “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Return to Tintern Abbey.” New Literary History 26.2 (Spring, 1995): 309–22.

“After analyzing the last section of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ I will discuss [Dorothy Wordsworth’s poem] ‘Thoughts on my sick bed.’ I will argue that it replies directly to the hopes of futurity evoked in the last lines of her brother’s poem. Dorothy’s poem echoes her brother’s earlier works, borrowing from them as liberally as William once borrowed from her journals. The intermingling of poetic images helps us to reexamine the function of address and apostrophe: figural evocations of subjectivity produced by turning, and returning, to another person. I will conclude with a few remarks about the meaning of recent critical views of both Wordsworths” (p. 309).

Posted on

Cervelli — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (2007)

Cervelli, Kenneth R. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Contents:  Introduction — 1. Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals — 2. The High Road Home: Paths to Ecology in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland — 3. The Illuminated Earth: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry — 4. “More Allied to Human Life”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Communion with the Dead — Conclusion: Trapped in the Weather of the Days: Dorothy Wordsworth in Her Environment — Notes — Bibliography — Index.

Summary (from the Routledge website): “Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period. ¶ With the rise of women’s studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy’s work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy’s writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade. ¶ One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy’s changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy’s work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.”

Copy: Library of Congress.